How to watch Acestreams and SopCasts without installing Ace Player or SopCast for RaspBMC

Announcements

UPDATE 22/09/15: Woah, this page is still getting views even though Wiziwig has been down for about nine months now. Some of this stuff might be outdated but I currently have no time to make any updates for the content of this page. Sorry for that but I hope that you can still get something useful information out of this!

UPDATE 24/12/14: Firstly, yes I am writing this and it’s Christmas Eve, I really have nothing else to do at the moment. And for the important part: If you haven’t tried Chromecast yet, I suggest that you do because it’s quite awesome and simple device to get your browser window to your television screen.

I’m working on to find the easiest solution to watch Acestreams on your Chromecast and so far I’ve found just some stupid tutorials of how to get Acestreams to your Chromecast with your Android device. I’m quite sure that for Windows users there should be easier way using .webm with Configuring Ace Player for streaming part of this tutorial. When I figure that out I’ll make a new page in this site for that operation.

I have to say that I’m happy to see how much this page gets views per day. I hope you can still get something useful out of this since some of the stuff might be outdated. If there is something that is just plainly broken please mention it in the comment section.

I’ve made all these things in my hometown where I visit about once in a month or two so I haven’t put much effort to check if everything still works. Now that we have Chromecast for streaming browser content and Viaplay to stream all the major sports there really isn’t much use for our RaspBMC anymore.

The Tutorial

You need a laptop or desktop PC (tested with Windows 7 & 8) with Ace Player and a decent Local Area Network to try these with your RaspBMC. If Windows Firewall suspects anything about Ace Player or Putty while you’re doing this, just allow allow everything.

Table of Contents

Checking (local) IP Address of your Raspbmc and Enabling SSH for later use

Checking streaming PC (local) IP Address

Configuring Ace Player for streaming

Optional: Adjust Ace Player’s buffering settings

Setting up Raspberry PI

Update 30/12/13: .pls playlist that helps launch the stream back on automatically if stopped while buffering

Configuring Ace Player for streaming

1) start up the TS Player / AceStream player and go to Options > Preferences

–> Show all options (bottom left of the popup screen)

—>select Stream output

–> enter this code in the Default Stream Output Chain field

#duplicate{dst=”http{mux=ts,dst=:8902/tv.asf}”,dst=display}

Find a working Acestream (http://www.wiziwig.tv/index.php?part=sports)

or try Ace Player’s test stream

CTRL + T (Open Ace Stream Content ID) in Ace Player

Test stream id: 6efaec5d8be7e886cf635e5359d1be173bb299a0

Start playing. If nothing happens check http://info.acestream.org/#/test → Play → Right-click → Share → Copy Content ID and try again. Some Internet Service Providers block torrents so you should check that Acestreams work with your Internet. If it works you can choose one of these methods to stream to your raspbmc.UPDATE 12/23/13: Adjusting AceStream settings, not necessary if everything works! Just keep this in mind if you have problems with buffering pauses.

1) In the settings (check the picture below, in (my Windows 8.1) bottom-right there’s icons for VLC, current instance of Ace Player and rainbow-colored Ace Stream HD. Right-click the rainbow-colored and choose Options) you need to set the TS maximum upload speed to the maximum, leave the value “0” (default).

2) In the setting of TS increase buffer Live 2-3 times (20-30 seconds) or more. Live Buffer, s Default: 10

3) Then, increase number of peers in 2 times. Maximum number of connections – 400, the maximum number of connections to the stream – 100. Total max connects & Max connects per stream Defaults: 200 & 50

4) If your computer is connected through a router, you must open port 8621. Don’t have to do this unless you can’t connect at all (I think), if you don’t know how to open ports check for your router here

5) Also, the router to enable UPnP, if it is off. I have absolutely no idea how this affects.

CLICK APPLY BEFORE YOU CLICK OK. For some magical reason my new settings were not saved if I pressed just OK. Don’t ask me why, I haven’t got a slightest idea :)

Setting up the Raspberry PI

SSH connection with Raspberry

Open Putty Tray with another computer

Connect to (Raspberry) IP you looked up (something like 192.168.1.220)

Username: pi

Password: raspberry (you can’t see the letters while typing password)

If you see pi@raspbmc:~$ you’re able to write following commands (see the picture below)

Open Streams folder and you will find your mystream.strm file. When your streaming PC has buffered everything and runs smoothly you can press mystream.strm and your RaspBMC begins to play the stream.

Update 30/12/13: .pls playlist that helps launch the stream back on automatically if stopped while buffering

You can make a .pls playlist of many instances of your stream link. The easiest way is with http://tvtvtv.ru/tools/plc_eng.php and using nano. Playlist allows you to watch the stream even though it stops for buffering once in a while.

If you look at xbmc documentation you’ll see that default values would be True, 100 and 20 (instead of false, 1000 and 300). This was the reason you would get the annoying “Playback failed” message if Ace Player had been buffering for more than 20-40 seconds. Now it keeps trying for five minutes for every playlist object. If your stream gets buffered more than that, it’s not even worth watching.

Alternative (I haven’t tested this):

http://ru.man.wikia.com/wiki/Raspbmc installing AceStream to XBMC, no idea about the version. Translatable to English with Chrome.

Watching SopCast streams with RaspBMC without installing X-Sopcast

Do everything introduced in Configuring Ace Player and Setting up the Raspberry Pi.

Open SopCast

Option → General → Use my own player → Should be something like C:\Users\myusername\AppData\Roaming\ACEStream\player\ace_player.exe

Open your SopCast stream and wait for buffering

Find your .pls or .strm file with Chorus interface and enjoy the show with your Raspberry PI!

Sometimes the video format isn’t supported completely by Raspberry’s OMXPlayer and therefore you see only visualization of sounds. It’s important that you purchase MPEG-2 and VC-1 codecs and enter their codes in your XBMC settings.

Thanks for making the tut. I’ve been using the p2p-streams add-on for XBMC recently, connecting my Windows PC directly to my TV.

This week, I decided to get a RPi to perform this task, so that I do not need to move my PC every time I wish to watch live streaming – I’ve got Raspbmc up and running no problem, but only Sopcast streams currently work via p2p-streams add-on. This led me to your tutorial – however, having created the .pls file with my local IP address, I am getting a playback error:

#duplicate{dst=”http{mux=ts,dst=:8902/tv.asf}”,dst=display} how should i modify this , so that it creates and records stream into A file (on desktop for example) that i can watch , later when i turn OFF acestream player ?

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I'm 25 years old Information Technology student who likes to work with computers. This site is about all the useful stuff I've done during the last years. I hope someone will get something out of them :)